More specific information about why its closing down are lawsuits of groomed minors.
press coverage of 1 case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791
The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.
The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.
I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.
I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.
Not that it's going to happen. Too many people slap a device in front of their kids with an unlimited data plan and no supervision.
It's a hard problem to solve, probably as unsolvable as any other wide-scale problem.
Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.
Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special education on account of their behavior are in no position to supervise their online activity.
I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and educational outlook, the greater the parent’s (singular in most cases) social media presence. I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.
Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special education track. All the research points to the impact of the home and family on these outcomes.
Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational parenting you suggest.
It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".
There was a local university student in UQAM who made the news a few years ago and she publicly bragged she was earning a million a year.
Not everyone is going to be a top earner like this, but don't be delusional that it's only an option for lowest income individuals.
If they were making a lot of money, and not as poor, there is a higher chance their parenting duties were fulfilled.
There's certainly a strong link about kids doing bad in school and the housing quality and home atmosphere.
All this is in the context of asking parents to provide their children the guidance required to avoid child-inappropriate content.
My point stands: a large and growing contingent of parents lack the stability/ability/support required to even keep their children's behavior within acceptable boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids away from bad actors on the internet can be added to their plate.
I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)
The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.
I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting. Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents, sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.
It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major problem.
I think today parents have access to far better means of regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much time and getting into trouble.
Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?
For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).
That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.
Every form of social media is an open window for groomers and filled with abuse. You just don't see it as openly, and it's often relegated to DMs. But Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Reddit, YouTube etc... and there are hundreds of influencers who use TikTok or other platforms to market their OnlyFans content, sometimes specifically focusing on younger demographics.
Sounds more like an 11 year old stole their parents' rental car and the family turned around and sued the rental car company. It's a stretch to even suggest Omegle was akin to "rental car company" since they didn't charge, it was more like a P2P car sharing app.
She met him once on omegle and gave him her contact info. She could have met him on the train or in the street and it would have ended the same way.
Parents are supposed to teach kids about stranger danger. She should be suing her folks.
The reporters literally camped outside this guys house, ran across his lawn shouting at him, chased him to his door, and immediately accused him of harming children. Then the scene cuts to the reporter describing that as a “civil conversation”.
I had forgot, this is 2023 where there's never a middle ground in any discourse, regardless of topic. Thanks for the reminder.
I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Edit: was it because of the video component of Omegle?
> I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee messaging is going to become illegal...
Do tech companies need to verify government issued IDs to register new users?
Like proving I am at least 18 years old without giving out my birth date or name.
Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up” and own that they’re facilitating this abuse? It seems like one of those finger pointing cases which falls apart when any level of scrutiny is applied.
But some ambulance chasing lawyer told them they have a chance to win in this case.
You are in a clear majority position but still pretend to be persecuted and victimized by an imagined boogeyman.
Omegle (business model: "Uber for child grooming")
I had no view either way until reading this thread, and seeing that many adults used the site, which it seems did nothing illegal. Their greatest sin it seems was allowing humans to connect with one another. Something that’s increasingly seen as a danger that requires government intervention into.
If people could go back in time, we would never have public education because “it attracts predators and facilitates child victimization!”
See how stupid that is?
Of this thread. I presume the vast majority of people don't really care about Omegle, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the nostalgic commenters here haven't actually used it since 2009. I have semi recently, and let me tell you there was a lot more dick on there than I remember.
I do find it weird that most of this post is blaming (in order) the family, the government, woke society. It seems fairly obvious to me we should be blaming the people showing their dicks to everyone and the pedophiles.
Overall I understand any site choosing to shut down rather than having to foot the bill of policing their users, I probably would too.
> If people could go back in time, we would never have public education because “it attracts predators and facilitates child victimization!”
We both know this isn't true. We still have church after all.
There is no point in blaming parts of the system that we can't change. As a society, we have mechanisms for changing liability laws and allowing/banning free communication. But there is no mechanism that has a worthwhile cost for ensuring there are no pedophiles in the world.
Yeah, you should bring up snail mail next.
Even if we imagine someone using SMS in this day and age, still no one uses it to send photos or videos or broadcast live abuse.
> Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up”
For better or worse a lot of what they do is considered essential service (calling emergency, disaster response etc).
e2ee messaging isn't essential, and yes ordinary non-tech people are waking up to harmful uses of it. If tech industry doesn't own up to that and work to combat those, someone else will and in that case rest assured you will not like the result:)
internet watch foundation is about censorship. they only "protect the children" so you can't contradict them without looking like a criminal. they actually give criminals a legal defense as their content hash system is easy to prove a false positive.
also they are going after the only service which contributed to arrests. lol. you think criminals don't use facebook/Instagram/telegram/tiktok/email/googlemeet/msteams/etc just because you haven't heard about arests?!